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How to choose Slow Motion or Fast Motion Frame Rates on Panasonic GH4

Typically when you want slow motion from a DSLR / Mirrorless camera you shoot in 60fps and conform it down to your 24p/30p project. It's a bit different with the new GH4 and as someone who doesn't read user manuals, selecting these new framerates on the GH4 was just a little confusing so I thought i'd share this video.

By choosing 96fps VFR will give you 25% playback on your 24p Recording Frame Rate for slow motion. Choosing 2fps VFR will give you 1200% playback on your 24p Recording Frame Rate to simulate fast motion. Fast motion is a great option. Instead of doing interval Time Lapse images that have to be stitched in post, the GH4 will save the entire sequence into a single video file. Very fun feature that opens up more creative shooting options when you're out and about. Stay tuned for more GH4 tips.

@Chad W - The way it works in the GH4 is when you are done recording in VFR, the files is saved as 24fps. So it is automatically playing in Slow motion. When you add a VFR to premiere it will play in slow motion. If you want it to play faster you have to retime the clip and make it faster.

Same question as Eric from before: Can I shoot all my clips at 96fps and then choose manually in Adobe Premiere which clips play at 100% and which ones play at 25%? OR should I be looking at another option, like just slowing down a 60fps clip? Any tips or pointers would be helpful.

I want to shoot my son's hockey game with some slow motion. Can I shoot all my clips at 96fps and then choose manually in Adobe Premiere which clips play at 100% and which ones play at 25%? OR should I be looking at another option, like just slowing down a 60fps clip? Any tips or pointers would be helpful.

Hi Emm, thanks for tip. I didn't hear you cover this issue, but it looks like this option is not available for 4k. So, if you're shooting 4k, and you need to shoot slow-mo or speed things up, you will still need to go into the camera and change resolution to 1080p before changing frame rates. Am I wrong?

@Daniel Hughes - Of each tests that we've performed we did not have that experience. It was instantly saved to the card without 'buffering', but at that time we were using very fast Sandisk Extreme Pro 95MB/s SDXC cards. I did not experience this with my Samsung SDHC cards also.

The shutter speed depends on what you need to do. For example if you want to slow more down using a plugin like Twixtor pro, you need to have less blur possibile, so you need to set your shutter at the highest.

Thanks, Emm, helpful as always. I was afraid I would have to read the manual, lol. got mine on Friday.Shot a still assignment with mine yesterday at 6400 ISO. Images are usable..... Each generation gets better and better.....

@Ron Baselice - There is no audio. You can experiment with shutter speed, but yes ours was 1/200ths. It really depends on how fast your subject is moving and how sharp you want those images to be.

The faster the shutter speed the less motion blur you will have. There is one scene with the fast water drops which you can see many droplets are blurred out. If the shutter speed was faster each drop would have been sharp.

@Paul - Thanks, yes 96fps is 25% the speed or 4X slower. Basically 96fps % 4 = 24fps / or 24fps X 4 = 96fps. Works out perfectly. When choosing 30fps you still have the option of 96fps but playback will be 31% of normal playback. Not as slow, and the math doesn't come out perfectly since nobody uses 31fps as a playback. For the average consumer, they probably won't pixel peep this to death.

It will have been helpful to clarify that choosing 30 fps or 24 fps as a target frame rate is not an inconsequential option, but rather significantly affects the quality of slow motion; true 96 fps motion is only available in the 24 fps container.